Building a reputable brand name can take time and patience. Hundreds of new product names or companies enter the market for the first time every day, and the world is out there watching – ready to love them or hate them. When you are the person behind that brand or product, that thing is your baby! You want the very best for your new creation, and want to give it a running start with people cheering for it all over the Twitters, and the Likes, and the other umpteen social water coolers the internet has to offer.
But wait, something is lurking in the shadows… You launched the product right and orders are coming in. You’re seeing sales coming from Google, Bing, Amazon, heck even places you hadn’t expected like people finding you on Pinterest and Tumblr. So what’s wrong? Well, you have this hunch that sales could and should be better. A few months have gone by, and you know the volume is out there. Then you notice it. Sure enough, when people search for things like
“<YOUR PRODUCT> problem”
“<COMPANY NAME> customer support”
some not-so-positive results are lining up in the first page of Google. Ouch..
Why? Because Google were quick to index (and rank) anything bad or good about your company or brand name for those terms before YOU had thought about preparing for what would show up.
The best remedy to this is to be ahead of the game. Before you start selling your first product or start pushing your new company / brand name out there – create your own “negative” search engine results before real customers beat you to it!
Here’s how:
1) Use a tool such as UberSuggest.org to identify common negatively laced search terms in your industry. We have all seen how Google and other search engines now will suggest searches for you – based on the most popular searches:
In this case - you want to look for phrases that often occur when people search for your competitor’s names or products. For instance, if you are in the supplement business, you will often see that people have searched for things like
PRODUCT + side effects, or
PRODUCT + risks.
If you are offering a service, SaaS, or B2B product, you might notice that the names of competitors are often being searched with things like
COMPANY + scam,
COMPANY + complaints, etc.
Basically all kinds of terms that customers use when they are trying to pre-qualify you before they decide to buy. Your mission should be to help yourself get pre-qualified by controlling what is showing up when they do this kind of brand research.
2) Next, now that you have identified a few terms that people would potentially search for on YOUR name or product, it is time to prepare your own defense – before there is even a price on your head!
3) Write some content (our outsource the job) that talks about your product or company. It is up to you what you want to say, but make absolutely sure that it sounds like it is written by a 3rd party. They could be mini-reviews, Facebook posts, tweets, blog comments, or forum posts – and could even have a *slight* negative angle towards your product – as long as it comes across as overall positive. For example, the content could be a customer who says
4) Finally, you want to spread this type of content out and do some basic SEO on them. Any SEO and social signals should be done around the terms you found earlier. Not much is needed if your brand or company name is entirely new. Google and the others will eat up any content it will find on a new term, and the stuff you have written about yourself will be the first to rank – and most likely stick!
5) There are 10 spots on the first page of Google. Secure yourself all these spots for the most negative keywords about your brand or company name. Later down the road when any REAL negative posts will start to get indexed, they will have a bit of a harder time outranking your already SEO’d and established content. But – keep an eye on it once in a while, because social media IS very powerful these days. Powerful enough to push rankings around and move older content out of the way. So to be sure your brand researching customers are not finding too much real smut on you – stay on top of controlling what they can see. At least for the most part.
Of course, this isn’t all about securing spots for negative things about you either. The number thing people look for is obviously YOUR PRODUCT + review, so if you can get some really good reviews indexed out there before the herd – you are already miles ahead, even of yourself.
But wait, something is lurking in the shadows… You launched the product right and orders are coming in. You’re seeing sales coming from Google, Bing, Amazon, heck even places you hadn’t expected like people finding you on Pinterest and Tumblr. So what’s wrong? Well, you have this hunch that sales could and should be better. A few months have gone by, and you know the volume is out there. Then you notice it. Sure enough, when people search for things like
“<YOUR PRODUCT> problem”
“<COMPANY NAME> customer support”
some not-so-positive results are lining up in the first page of Google. Ouch..
Why? Because Google were quick to index (and rank) anything bad or good about your company or brand name for those terms before YOU had thought about preparing for what would show up.
The best remedy to this is to be ahead of the game. Before you start selling your first product or start pushing your new company / brand name out there – create your own “negative” search engine results before real customers beat you to it!
Here’s how:
1) Use a tool such as UberSuggest.org to identify common negatively laced search terms in your industry. We have all seen how Google and other search engines now will suggest searches for you – based on the most popular searches:
In this case - you want to look for phrases that often occur when people search for your competitor’s names or products. For instance, if you are in the supplement business, you will often see that people have searched for things like
PRODUCT + side effects, or
PRODUCT + risks.
If you are offering a service, SaaS, or B2B product, you might notice that the names of competitors are often being searched with things like
COMPANY + scam,
COMPANY + complaints, etc.
Basically all kinds of terms that customers use when they are trying to pre-qualify you before they decide to buy. Your mission should be to help yourself get pre-qualified by controlling what is showing up when they do this kind of brand research.
2) Next, now that you have identified a few terms that people would potentially search for on YOUR name or product, it is time to prepare your own defense – before there is even a price on your head!
3) Write some content (our outsource the job) that talks about your product or company. It is up to you what you want to say, but make absolutely sure that it sounds like it is written by a 3rd party. They could be mini-reviews, Facebook posts, tweets, blog comments, or forum posts – and could even have a *slight* negative angle towards your product – as long as it comes across as overall positive. For example, the content could be a customer who says
4) Finally, you want to spread this type of content out and do some basic SEO on them. Any SEO and social signals should be done around the terms you found earlier. Not much is needed if your brand or company name is entirely new. Google and the others will eat up any content it will find on a new term, and the stuff you have written about yourself will be the first to rank – and most likely stick!
5) There are 10 spots on the first page of Google. Secure yourself all these spots for the most negative keywords about your brand or company name. Later down the road when any REAL negative posts will start to get indexed, they will have a bit of a harder time outranking your already SEO’d and established content. But – keep an eye on it once in a while, because social media IS very powerful these days. Powerful enough to push rankings around and move older content out of the way. So to be sure your brand researching customers are not finding too much real smut on you – stay on top of controlling what they can see. At least for the most part.
Of course, this isn’t all about securing spots for negative things about you either. The number thing people look for is obviously YOUR PRODUCT + review, so if you can get some really good reviews indexed out there before the herd – you are already miles ahead, even of yourself.
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